DigiDesign Pro Tools, Reference Manual, Page: 550 / 886

Pro Tools Reference Guide 536
“Tighten Up” Performances Beat Detective can
be used to improve the timing of some audio
material by calculating and extracting its aver-
age tempo, and then conforming its rhythmic
components—regions separated with Beat De-
tective—to the session’s tempo map.
Loop Matching Since Beat Detective can extract
tempo and beat information from audio, and
conform audio to an existing tempo map or
groove template, this makes it very useful for
aligning loops with different tempos or grooves.
If a loop is at a different tempo than the current
session, Beat Detective lets you quickly separate
each beat in the loop and conform them to the
tempo map (as an alternative to time compress-
ing or expanding the loop, which can alter the
pitch and tone of the audio).
Remixes Beat Detective can be used for remixes
or creating new rhythms. It can extract tempo
from the original drum tracks, or in some in-
stances the original stereo mix. New audio or
MIDI tracks can then be conformed to the orig-
inal material, or the original material can be
conformed to new drum tracks, achieving an
entirely new feel.
Smoothing Post Production Edits (Audio
Only)
Beat Detective’s Edit Smoothing can be
used to automatically clean up foley tracks that
contain many regions requiring trimming and
crossfading, effectively removing the gaps of si-
lence between the regions (thus retaining the
room tone throughout the track).
Beat Detective Requirements
Beat Detective is available with all Pro Tools sys-
tems.
RAM Requirements for Beat Detective
Beat Detective operations can require a large
amount of RAM, especially when working with
multiple tracks and lengthy selections.
To avoid low memory situations with Beat De-
tective, do the following:
• If you begin to experience slower Beat Detec-
tive response, add more RAM to your com-
puter.
• If your computer does not have the extra
RAM, work with shorter selections, or individ-
ual tracks.
• Set the Editing preference for Levels of Undo
to a smaller value (see “Levels of Undo and
Memory” on page 357). Memory-intensive
editing operations, such as Edit Smoothing
(audio only) with Beat Detective, can use up a
large amount of memory when in the Undo
queue.
When working with tick-based audio, use
Beat Detective’s Region Separation com-
mand to quickly separate audio regions into
individual “hits” (or slices). You can also
create a region group of the separated re-
gions to facilitate editing and arranging.
Pro Tools LE does not support using Beat
Detective across multiple tracks. When
Beat Detective is applied to multiple tracks,
only the top track is edited.